by Bryan Mealer
Grady was so ill he could barely stand. He’d come down with something the night before and spent half the night in the bathroom. That morning he told Ann there was no way he could travel, so they’d canceled their honeymoon in Ruidoso, New Mexico. Down at the altar he wobbled in his rented tux, his skin pasty, but managed to repeat his vows.
From the front pew, Iris watched the ceremony as if it were a car accident in slow motion. She squeezed her niece Judi’s hand and Judi could feel her whole body trembling. As Grady and Ann exchanged their vows, Judi looked at Iris’s face and saw tears pouring down her cheeks.
“Oh, Mama, you were crying,” Ann said afterward.
“I was just…” Iris said, forcing a smile. “I was just so happy for you.”
8
Dad survives the storm … oil returns to Texas … a new adventure begins …
Dad served as best man in Grady’s wedding. The request came as a surprise, considering he hadn’t heard from Grady since his own wedding in 1973, to which Grady had been invited only because Opal had insisted. Ann told him later that when it came time for Grady to choose a best man, he was the only friend Grady could think of.
Another surprise was that Grady had landed a job in Midland with the American Diabetes Association—as its regional director. He had an office on West Wall Street, a small staff of associates, plus a cute blonde who answered his phone with her long legs up on her desk. The Herald even ran a story about the appointment, along with a photo of Grady dressed in one of his leisure suits. It noted that he’d recently organized a seminar at the hospital entitled “Podiatry in Chronic Disease and Diabetes.”
It all seemed strange, because whenever Dad thought about Grady, he saw only the awkward guy in the hallways. And, of course, how could he forget that day at the old man’s house?
He’d never spoken to Grady about any of that stuff, and he wouldn’t know how to, anyway. So what if Grady was suddenly married? People change, he thought. Sometimes it took a good woman to turn a man around, something Dad could attest to personally. Ann Tollett made Grady seem more approachable and somehow less of a freak. If anything, Dad was rather proud of Grady. He’d always talked about getting rich, and from what everyone said about the Tolletts, Grady had done well.
In fact, it wasn’t long after the wedding that Grady called one night asking if Mom and Dad wanted to go to Lubbock for supper.
“Lubbock’s two and a half hours away,” Dad told him.
“Well, not if you take a plane,” Grady said. A limousine would pick them up in an hour.
Sure enough, Grady had chartered a little single-engine Cessna for the night. Mom and Dad had probably taken one plane ride in their entire lives, and neither had ever seen the inside of a limousine. The Cessna had four seats and no bathroom, but they were in the air for only thirty minutes, during which Grady sat up with the pilot, headset on, pointing to the instruments like some kind of boss.
Another black car sat waiting in Lubbock to take them to Smuggler’s Inn for steaks and seafood, all of which Grady paid for. They flew back to Midland in time to relieve the high school girl whom Mom had called to babysit me. When the limo pulled up to the house, Grady walked inside and handed the girl a hundred-dollar bill. After that, she was always available.
* * *
By the time Grady was chartering Cessnas, the energy crisis was on.
Since the fifties, limits on domestic production had opened the door for cheap crude from the Middle East and Africa, which we consumed without limit. At the close of the sixties, America was using more oil than ever before, while producing less. The once abundant fields in East Texas and the Permian Basin, at one time so mighty that world markets swung on their output alone, couldn’t begin to satisfy our thirst, no matter how much we drilled. In fact, Texas reached peak production in 1972, but with little effect. The country needed more oil, and by then we were almost out (or so we thought).
That year saw the first long lines at filling stations from coast to coast. People seemed gripped with an end-times panic as they sat idling in the cold. Dallas nearly ran out of gas in early 1973, and in May, the mayor of San Antonio said the city was ten days from shutting down. Arab producers in the OPEC nations took advantage of their new power and doubled prices, and still we paid—especially the refineries.
Texans were so desperate for oil, the pipeline from West Texas to the Gulf was reversed. In May 1973, the Big Spring refinery received its first shipment of Middle Eastern crude—354,854 barrels from Iraq. By that summer the nation was importing 6.2 million barrels per day, twice as much as in 1970.
Then, in October, Egypt attacked Israel. OPEC raised crude prices by 70 percent, then refused to sell the United States anything because we supported the Jewish state. They also cut their own production, a power move that sent the global economy into a tailspin recession. Everything went up, from interest rates to the price of a gallon of milk. Gas prices went up 40 percent and the long lines continued, people fuming as Watergate played over the radio.
Although high oil prices crippled the rest of the country, they came as a boon to states that still could pump crude out of the ground, chiefly Texas. Better, by late 1976, in an effort to curtail imports, the government began its slow easing of price controls and restrictions on domestic drilling. The gates wouldn’t fully open for another few years, but rig counts across the state steadily began to climb. The Permian Basin, at long last, was headed for another boom, and Midland would shine at its tawdry center.
By the mid-seventies, the twenty miles between Midland and Odessa marked a chasm of civilization. Both cities had experienced a slump in the sixties, when foreign crude squeezed the oil patch, but Midland had fared much better. Midland was still home to dozens of oil companies where executives in hand-tooled boots sat in glass buildings with ornamental pump jacks on their desks. It was where the big-gambling contractors lived, along with wildcatters blessed with knack and fortune, and the men of science: the sober geologists and petroleum engineers dressed in slacks and dusty oxfords. Midland was where men made money without dirtying their hands. And as the pendulum of the oil market began its upward swing, it was a hell of a place to sell cars.
What Dad loved selling most were pickups. His first year at the dealership, Ford introduced the F-150, which combined the dumb ruggedness of a truck with custom interior and trim options. The result was a pickup that a midlevel accountant could get away with driving (“hauling air,” as they said) and one that quickly became the standard fleet of the oil field.
Selling new cars and pickups required more than a good line, and for a time, Dad studied the other salesmen. First, he noticed, you had to look for signs that a person was serious about buying. The best sign was if a man brought along his wife. There were also a few questions you could ask to determine the potential of a sale, the most basic being “What is it you do for a living?” It wasn’t too intrusive, but the answer would tell you plenty.
Dad learned as a general rule that he shouldn’t waste time on roughnecks and oil field hands unless they had the price in cash, or at least enough credit through their wives to sway the finance team. No need to be rude, his coworkers told him, but he shouldn’t get a sunburn for a man who might not have a job in two months.
Now, if the guy’s an energy loan officer at First National? An engineer for Consolidated Petroleum? Well, give that man a card, get him behind the wheel of one of those new Explorers—limited edition, with red Styleside stripes, Cruise-O-Matic, and plush-carpeted interior. Let him drive down West Wall Street and up Marienfeld, see through the windshield the great city their money was building.
“You look good in this truck,” Dad told these men. “It’s about time you bought the vehicle that’s made just for you.”
He also learned that there was no cause for dishonesty or flimflam. The trick wasn’t to rob a man of his dignity, but to make him feel like he was walking out with a deal. What you wanted was volume. Move the units, get the volume, and the g
ross will come—along with a thousand-dollar bonus if you’re sharp.
* * *
For the customers that Dad just couldn’t close, Bill Rogers sent in his muscle—a man named Dick Bratcher. Dick was tall and kind of bald, with eyes like cut glass. “What would you buy it for? Come on, name a price,” he’d say, just friendly enough not to rattle anyone. Dad learned from Dick Bratcher how to bear down with an easy touch, and after a year under his tutelage, he’d sold enough units to win Salesman of the Month. His name was added to a plaque on the wall.
Dad worked long days at the car lot, usually twelve-hour shifts, and got close with the other salesmen. There was Schroeder, a former baseball player from Portland, Oregon. He was handsome and fit and spoke with a cute northern accent. When friends of the boss came to buy cars, they always asked for Schroeder, and so did their wives.
There was Lying Larry, “the Most Cheatin’est Car Salesman Alive,” who seemed honest but played the stereotype to the hilt. He liked to walk the showroom floor and pretend to greet customers by saying, “Welcome to Rogers Ford. Lying Larry’s the name, how can I jew ya, screw ya, and tattoo ya?” The guys standing around just died every time. Larry was also strong, and to demonstrate his strength, he’d grab a pole with both hands and hoist himself sideways in the air, then hang there like a flag.
After a while Dad started hanging out with some of the used-car salesmen who worked the adjacent lot, and he realized he could be making a lot more money. Unlike new units, which carried the manufacturer’s sticker price, used cars had a mystery component that a good salesman could exploit. No one knew how much the dealership had paid for the car, either at auction or on the trade-in. As long as you didn’t veer too far over the Blue Book, the profit margin was usually bigger. But you had to know how to sell it.
The used-car salesmen were older, grizzled men, but they liked Dad because he was cool and could score them weed. They took him drinking after work, but never to bars. Most nights they drove around town in one of the hot-rod demos, passing around a bottle of whiskey and pouring it into their beers.
They also threw high-stakes poker games where Dad was out of his league. A few mornings he woke up to realize he’d lost several hundred dollars the night before, then had to hustle all day to try to earn it back before Mom discovered it was gone. On those mornings, hungover and fragile, the Lord tugged at his conscience and brought him down a peg, leaving him feeling small in that vast car lot.
He was twenty-three years old with a family to support, and he’d made Mom a promise to walk a Christian path. Between Opal and Mom’s mother, there was already pressure to find a local church, and they’d talked for months about looking for one. Finally we joined an Assembly of God congregation on East Pennsylvania, but after going a few Sundays, we never really went back.
On Saturday nights, Dad invited Mark and Donny, his buddies from Big Spring, over to play cards and drink beer. Mom put up with the late nights. She said nothing about the pot smoke that wafted into the nursery while she put me to bed. One day she walked out into our small backyard, discovered a marijuana plant growing as tall as the fence, and nearly had a heart attack.
“Honest, I never thought it would get that big,” Dad told her. She handed him a pair of scissors and sent him to cut it down.
Mom was busy trying to establish herself, to put down roots and feel settled.
Around that time, she answered an ad for an interior designer position at Sears, and they hired her. Sears even arranged a two-week training course in Dallas so Mom could learn to sell custom drapes and upholstery. When it came time for Mom to leave, she left me with her mother in Snyder while Dad stayed behind to sell cars.
After a week of being alone, he started missing her. That Friday he called her hotel and said he was driving to Dallas after his shift. He didn’t tell her that first he planned to meet his buddies for drinks. He was drunk and swerving between the lines at 40 mph when the state trooper pulled him over outside of Weatherford. They charged him with a DWI and let him spend the night in jail.
The next morning, the judge summoned Dad to the bench, saying, “How much money you got in your billfold, son?” Dad told him three hundred dollars. The judge fined him $295, leaving him just enough to buy breakfast and think of all the ways to explain it to Mom.
Of course, she was angry, but as always, she forgave him. A few weeks later, however, she snapped. One night Mark and Donny were over playing cards and Mark was drunk. Mom didn’t like Mark. He had the stink of crazy on him, plus a pair of eyes like an owl that caught you when you weren’t looking. Just being in the same room with Mark gave Mom the creeps.
Mom was in the back room changing my diaper when she heard a loud crash. When she ran into the living room, she saw her antique tea set—the one Dad had given her before their wedding—shattered on the floor. Mark stood over the ruins, laughing.
Mom curled her lip, then did something she’d never done before. “Damn you, Mark Powell,” she shouted, “you get the hell out of my house!”
The sudden vulgarity coming from Mom’s mouth was so shocking that Dad stood there slack-jawed. Even Donny ran out the door.
* * *
Gambling, the DWI, and Mom being forced out of her character—Dad could read the signs. The Lord was telling him something.
“I feel like I’m slipping,” he told her one night. “But I can’t seem to stop.”
Then one morning Bill Rogers sent a few salesmen to Houston on a dealer transfer to deliver some pickups. It was Dad’s day off, the first he’d taken in months, otherwise he would have gone. When he returned the following morning, his manager told him there’d been an accident. On the way back to Midland, Lying Larry had fallen asleep and his car had veered off into a ditch, killing him instantly. Larry left behind a wife and a baby girl, who wasn’t much older than me.
The tragedy shook Dad deeply and plunged him into a fog, one he was still trying to escape when he and Mom nearly died themselves.
It happened on one of Grady’s airplanes. One Saturday night, they left me with the babysitter and flew to Lubbock for dinner. As they sat in the Smuggler’s Inn, one of those epic sandstorms rolled in with thunder and lightning on its back.
The pilot, at Grady’s urging, had ignored the weather forecast earlier that evening and gone ahead with the trip. Now they were stuck at the Lubbock airport, the wind howling and the sky flickering a foreboding pink and brown. The pilot refused to budge. “No way I’m going up in that,” he said.
But Grady was drunk and insisted they leave. “We’re gonna be stuck here all night. Just take us up high, get above the sand.” He then offered the pilot more money, and away they went.
It took minutes for the storm to swallow the Cessna somewhere above the plains. The wind flipped it sideways, then into a tumble. Then lightning struck the tail with a crash and sent them lurching even more. The pilot fumbled with the controls, trying to wrench the plane from nature, while Grady screamed and panicked, his face the color of skim milk.
At the rear of the plane, Mom, Dad, and Ann held each other, shouting “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” into the swirling maw. After what seemed like an eternity, the storm opened its jaws and let them through.
At the airport in Big Spring, they crawled down the plane’s ladder and lay flat on the tarmac until the earth stopped spinning. At home, Mom scooped me up from my crib and clutched me tight. She was furious with Grady and furious with herself for taking such a risk. “That night, you came close to being an orphan,” she would tell me, as if reminding herself of their misjudgment.
Not long after, Dad put in his two-week notice at Bill Rogers Ford and called his sister Zelda. She and Charlie had recently moved to Albuquerque, where Charlie managed the commissary at Kirtland Air Force Base. Dad didn’t have to say a word because his sister already knew. She’d been having those dreams.
“Something’s been telling me to pray for you, Bobby,” she said. “You’ve been heavy on my heart.”
Zelda and Charlie knew someone at church who sold cars at one of the big dealerships in town, so they put in a good word for Dad. We put a FOR SALE sign in the front yard of the house on Amigo Drive, and within days, thanks to the latest boom, it was sold. In October 1976, we packed a U-Haul truck with everything we owned and pointed west for New Mexico.
9
Adrift in a foreign land … the Texas miracle … Preston’s plea … the family comes home …
My first-ever memory comes from this time, and there at center stage is my grandmother Opal. Mom believes it was probably a Sunday, about a week before we pulled out of Midland, and I was staying at my grandparents’ house in Big Spring, as I sometimes did.
She was still plump, or “big-boned” (her own description). And her laugh, which sounded as if it came from some bottomless, untroubled place, had not changed. The singing voice that soothed Uncle Bud during his final days had lifted an octave higher with age, but remained her greatest power. As I got older, that voice carved its own beautiful groove in my memory.
Gone were the oversized, matronly dresses and the lace-up oxfords. The sixties and seventies had brought her and Bob out of black-and-white poverty and into modern color. She now wore bright silk dresses accentuated with bling: dazzling brooches, big necklaces, and rings the size of little gumballs. For their recent anniversary, Bob had dipped into his savings and bought her a white Coupe de Ville, previously owned.
By now Opal worked at the dress shop that her brother Herman had bought for his daughter Evelyn. The shop, Miss Royale, was located at the Highland Shopping Center, where most days she and Evelyn wore high heels on the thick carpet while dressing ranchers’ wives in Nardis of Dallas and other designers. On weekends Opal worked the cash register at Herman’s restaurant.